The public is being hit with absurdly late-to-the-news headlines saying Covid won’t be going away. Its favorite media-approved epidemiologists now warn that everyone must get it sooner or later. Harvard’s Michael Mina breaks the news that not the worst thing right now is vaccinated people getting asymptomatic Delta infections—a “booster” shot against future variants likely to be as robust as any the government will be handing out.

And more absurd than ever is social-media censorship of experts who say anything slightly complicated about masks or vaccine hesitancy, as if their discordant thoughts must still be suppressed in the name of eliminating Covid forever.

This propaganda is now detrimental to the real goal. The coming surprise for Americans is that hybrid immunity, or vaccination plus inevitable exposure to an evolving virus, is our new way out. As much as it was right to try to soften this adjustment, look at Japan today, with Tokyo hospitals near collapse under the weight of a Delta outbreak. Look at New Zealand, an entire nation locked down over what was initially a single Delta case. These countries have yet to find a way to make peace with the virus and allow natural immunity to play its role in domesticating a new and unwelcome guest that won’t be going away. China will be the ultimate case study: facing Delta with a billion-plus people who are immunologically naive or reliant on inferior vaccines.